Aging Capriciously

A good friend of mine wrote the following piece about Ears and Hearing.  It is quite cute and relevant as many of us are getting older.  Being heard and being understood sometimes becomes quite problematic.  She gave me permission to post the following piece.  I think you will enjoy it.  I know I did.

EARS 

By Miriam Mladinov

We are born with two ears, one of each side of our head.  They are not beautiful, fleshy, curly, or naked.  The shape is best described like ear shaped.  If they were covered in fur, or at least fuzzy hairs like cat’s or dog’s, they would be prettier.  Cats and dogs have another advantage because they can turn theirs in the direction of sound to hear better.  By having two ears, spaced by a head in between, they are the first stereo equipment which gives us the direction and spatiality of sound: a really clever invention.

Ears also serve as a carrier of all kinds of trinkets for beautification. This is an ancient practice and many Egyptian, Roman, Aztec, even prehistoric human remains, sport some precious, ornate thing attached to their ears.  These decorations were often made of gold, silver bronze, and decorated with colorful beads or stones.  The practice is alive today and we call them earrings.  If they are round we call them redundantly hoop earrings.  They desperately cling to a fleshy lobular, dangling.  Some people choose to have holes all around the ear lobe usually filled with small studs or tiny loops.  One might think that the neat row of holes, like on a shoe, would be made to tie them together around the head with a shoelace.  Other people choose to have a large hoop inserted in the fleshy part stretching it out like an elastic band.

Growing up I thought that piercing ears was a barbaric practice.  It probably came from my mother’s belief because she kept her ears intact.… but I inherited a beautiful diamond set earrings from my grandmother and wanted to wear them.  When I went to a place to get my ears pierced, I wore an old shirt in case the blood would gush over it and brought my earrings with me to insert them in the new openings.  The girl wiped the area with alcohol and click, click inserted two studs like with a staple gun.  Not a drop of blood.  It was almost a letdown because it was so easy.  Now I have a whole collection of earrings.  My favorite are two little hoops made from my parents wedding rings.

Ears have another important function: TO HEAR.  It is one of our five senses.  We never think about it until it fails.

At first a friend tells you:

 “Do not get offended, but I think that you might need a hearing aid.”   

 “WHAT?”

Three men were sitting on a bench in a park.

“It is windy.”  The first said.

“No, it is Thursday.” Said the second.

“I am thirsty too.  Let’s get a beer.”  Said the third.

My neighbor approached me with a question:

“Do you have a problem with roses?”

“No.  I did not pay much attention this year.”

“We had an invasion.”

“Invasion of roses?”

“We were gone for a while and roaches were coming out from the sewer.”

She never realized the confusion because she might be hard of hearing herself.  After I went home, I could not stop laughing.  Roses – roaches, quite a difference.

If I don’t actively listen, I often miss the first part of what is said to me, the second I get.  That results in often missing the subject of the sentence and asking: Who or what?

The worst part is with names. 

We shake hands and a person tells me: “Aaoouu .”

I say my name and politely ask him/her to repeat the name: “Aaoouu.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Then I run into the same person a few weeks later.  I still do not know his/her name because I never heard it in the first place.

“Oh, sure I remember you.  We met a few weeks ago.  Sorry, can you tell me your name again?”

“Aaoouu!”

Another time at a gathering, I approached a guy and asked him about his sick wife.  He gave me a blank look and said that he had a problem hearing.  I said that I too have the problem and moved away realizing that I approached the wrong guy.  I waved at him and smiled in a way of apology.  He probably blamed himself for not understanding.  Poor guy.

I got my first set of hearing aids.  The small peeps go inside the ear and the minuscule computer sits discreetly behind.  The set is very light.  When I wear them, I forget about them until they get hungry and start to squeal.  Time to change batteries.

My dad, who became completely deaf when he turned 90 and had hearing aids, managed to accumulate used and new batteries all mixed in a pile in a box.  It was a big mess.  Talking to him face to face was somewhat possible, but over the phone was hopeless.  It caused several misunderstandings.  The worst one was when I called him from NY telling him that I had arrived after a month-long trip, and that I would stay for a few days in NY.  He expected me the next day back in Boston, and when I did not show up his panic escalated to gigantic proportion.  I was kidnapped.  I was murdered at the Port Authority.  Police were engaged and searched for his lost daughter who was having a good time with a friend in NY, completely oblivious to the upheaval that the call has caused.

Incidentally my NY friend tends to choose the nosiest corner on a street in NY to call me.  The traffic is clanking, the sirens are tooting, and she is expecting me to hear her soft-spoken voice.  She also likes to call me from the car while her husband is driving through the mountains or a tunnel.  Afterwards, she texts me how sorry she was that the line was interrupted.

The hearing aids help.  They help a lot if I am in a quiet place and talk to one person.  Great!  We can have a coherent conversation, but I am lost anywhere there are drones and noises.  At my exercise class where there is always some music going on, I never hear a joke, or a comment flaunted spontaneously by someone.  I try to find a place in front to hear the instructor, who does have a lousy diction (not only my opinion).  I get a lot by observing.  If I am on my back and we circle the ankle of the left foot, I often miss the clue to switch the leg.  It is not the end of the world if one ankle gets more rotations than the other, under the conditions that the next time with start with the other leg.

One unexpected consequence of wearing hearing aids is that I lost the sense of direction of the sound. That clever stereo quality is gone.  When my phone rings, I run all over the house to find it and usually when I get it, it stops.  I think that it does it on purpose.  Or when something beeps, I run to microwave to see what is ready.  Nothing.  I check the dishwasher.  It also calls when is done.  Nothing.  I run to the door.  Nothing.  I give up, and then realize that it was outside, the garbage truck backing up.

There are some helpful inventions like Bluetooth.  I wonder who named it that way.  It is an electronic miracle which beams the sound from your other miraculous devices straight to your hearing aids.  Mine are not that smart, so they gave me another gadget for additional cost, which I had to hang around my neck like a necklace, called Dongo.  It rings when my phone rings and I can activate the conversation from it, only if my phone is within a reasonable distance.  If it is not, I must do the same exercise of running around to locate it.  The Dongo is also designed to help with a conversation in a noisy restaurant if your company talks to Dongo instead to you.  We got into a competition.  This cumbersome little animal hanging from my neck did not last long.  My friend whose husband had one told me that his Dongo did not work too.

For watching TV, I have a pair of earphones clasping over my hearing aid.  I can control the volume on the TV remote, on earphones and on my hearing device.  This triple enhancement actually works.  It would make a dead person hear.

There are other means to bypass this handicap. I am not embarrassed to say that I have a hearing problem.  It is better that people know that, than thinking that I am stupid.  On an occasion when I was giving a presentation there were no problems with me doing it because I was the one who was talking.  Anticipating questions, I asked the guy who introduced me to repeat the questions out loud.  It helped me, and I think that it also helped many aging people in the audience.  Win-win.

A friend of mine who was a speech pathologist told me that deaf people had harder problems to adjust to socially than the blind.  Being hard of hearing is not the same as being deaf, but it also conditions one’s life.  I avoid large gatherings, do not enjoy theater and any place where there are extraneous noises.  I still enjoy the concerts.  I probably miss something, but I am not aware of it.  I love Japanese Taiko drummers.

Ears are precious.